Anwar Awlaki

Amid all the self-congratulation over the killing of Anwar Awlaki and the confident assertion that the world is a better place as a result, it is worth remembering that the secret, unilateral, targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan is hardly something to celebrate. If Awlaki was in fact the architect of terrorism attacks inside the United States, as officials maintain he was, then perhaps his demise is to be welcomed. But we don't really know, do we?

Two and a half years after a drone strike in Yemen killed New Mexico-born Anwar Awlaki, a federal appeals court has ordered the Obama administration to release a confidential memorandum that explains the legal justification for its extraordinary decision to assassinate a U.S. citizen. The administration should promptly comply. Monday's unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals was the result of a lawsuit by the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to force release of a memo prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Death from the sky Re "Targeted for death," Editorial, Oct. 2 The editorial was right on target as far as the civil liberties questions are concerned. There does indeed need to be some judicial finding that certain individuals (citizens or not) are in fact a mortal threat to the United States and therefore can be targeted for death. But The Times did not go into the question of national sovereignty. What is the constitutional authority for one of our drones to invade the airspace of a neutral country (Pakistan or Yemen)

Reports that the United States may target another U.S. citizen for death because of his alleged involvement in terrorism are troubling, especially in light of unanswered questions about the drone attack in Yemen in 2011 that killed the U.S.-born Anwar Awlaki. This time, the potential target is said to be in Pakistan. If the United States is again to deliberately take the life of one of its citizens without due process of law, leaders from the president on down must, at the very least, offer specific and credible proof that such action was absolutely necessary to prevent imminent attacks on Americans and that capturing the suspected terrorist was impossible.

October 1, 2011 | By David S. Cloud, Jeffrey Fleishman and Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times

U.S. Predator drone aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles carried out the targeted killing in northern Yemen of Anwar Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was a U.S. citizen, and also killed another American who produced virulent propaganda for Al Qaeda. The lethal strike, a CIA-led covert operation that relied on U.S. special operations forces and Yemeni authorities, marks the first time since in the anti-terrorism campaign began after the Sept. 11 attacks a decade ago that the U.S. government deliberately tracked and killed an American citizen.

While living in San Diego in the late 1990s, Anwar Awlaki regularly fished for albacore and shared his catch with a neighbor. At the local mosque where he preached, he delighted in playing soccer with young children and taking the teenagers paint-balling. "He had an allure. He was charming," Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, outreach director of an Islamic center in Falls Church, Va., where Awlaki later gave sermons, told reporters in 2009. With his fashionable eyeglasses and fluent English, the U.S.-born radical cleric also had been called a "Pied Piper of jihadists," an Internet phenomenon who produced video and audio recordings to lure Westerners to his extremist ideologies.

Anyone who is still not sure whether Anwar Awlaki is a bitter, fulminating, implacable enemy of the United States should check out the video posted online Monday. In it, the U.S.-born radical Islamic cleric urges his followers to kill Americans even when there is no religious fatwa in place calling on them to do so. "Don't consult with anybody in killing the Americans," Awlaki says. "Fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers seeking divine guidance. " Not only is he repugnant, but he's dangerous too, according to U.S. officials.

Reports that the United States may target another U.S. citizen for death because of his alleged involvement in terrorism are troubling, especially in light of unanswered questions about the drone attack in Yemen in 2011 that killed the U.S.-born Anwar Awlaki. This time, the potential target is said to be in Pakistan. If the United States is again to deliberately take the life of one of its citizens without due process of law, leaders from the president on down must, at the very least, offer specific and credible proof that such action was absolutely necessary to prevent imminent attacks on Americans and that capturing the suspected terrorist was impossible.

A U.S. military drone strike killed a top Al Qaeda operative in Yemen and the son of Anwar Awlaki, the American-born cleric killed in a similar strike two weeks ago, Yemeni security officials said. As political unrest continues to roil Yemen, the U.S. has escalated its attacks against Al Qaeda's affiliate in the country. Yemeni officials told reporters that nine members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were killed in the strike near the town of Azzan in southeastern Yemen, including Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman Awlaki, and Egyptian-born Ibrahim Banna, whom officials described as the media chief of the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.

May the U.S. government kill one of its own citizens without first convicting him of a crime? A court may have the opportunity to answer that important question. After being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Treasury Department has issued a license allowing the civil liberties groups to provide legal services to the father of Anwar Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric who is reportedly on a list of individuals targeted for assassination by the military or the CIA. Awlaki's father insists that his son is not a terrorist.

A Kansas man was arrested on terrorism charges in connection with a plot to blow up a car bomb at Wichita's Mid-Continent Airport, officials announced on Friday. Terry Lee Loewen, 58, described in a nationally televised news conference as an avionics technician who worked at the airport, was arrested Friday morning driving what he thought was a car bomb. “By the time you read this I will -- if everything went as planned -- have been martyred in the path of Allah,” Loewen wrote in a letter to a relative that was part of the criminal complaint released by the government.

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence officials long have said that Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen had eclipsed the global terrorism network's core leadership in Pakistan as the chief threat to American facilities and interests. Recent events, including the Obama administration's decision to temporarily shutter more than two dozen diplomatic missions around the globe, have brought that claim into stark relief. In the latest developments Wednesday, a suspected U.S. drone strike killed seven more alleged Al Qaeda militants traveling in two cars in southern Yemen, the fifth such attack in less than two weeks.

WASHINGTON - A suspected U.S. drone strike in Yemen - the fourth reported in the last 10 days - killed four alleged Al Qaeda members Tuesday, as the U.S. and British governments evacuated their embassies because of intelligence suggesting a possible terrorist attack. A drone-launched missile struck a vehicle in Marib province, east of the Yemeni capital, Sana, killing the four militants, according to the Yemen Post , a privately-owned English language newspaper. A second strike targeted a "militant hideout," the paper said, citing local security officials.

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington will hear a challenge to the Obama administration's approach to targeted killings. I find myself frustrated by how little progress we've made. In 2004, I represented Guantanamo Bay detainees in the Supreme Court in Rasul vs. Bush, challenging President George W. Bush's claim that he could hold noncitizens at Guantanamo without judicial review based on the administration's unilateral claim that the detainees were enemies of the United States.

WASHINGTON - In his early teens, Jude Kenan Mohammad was a familiar sight in his middle-class section of Raleigh, N.C., riding around on his bike to deliver groceries to elderly Muslim neighbors. But with an American mother and Pakistani father, Mohammad felt caught between two worlds, friends recalled. As he grew older, the mild-mannered young man criticized the U.S. war in Afghanistan and believed that he was a target for discrimination in post-Sept. 11 America, the friends said.

WASHINGTON - A day before President Obama is set to deliver a major speech on national security, his administration acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that it had killed four U.S. citizens - one more than previously known - with drone missile strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. In a letter to congressional leaders, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said the administration had deliberately killed Anwar Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was slain in September 2011 in Yemen, but had killed three other Americans inadvertently.

Yemeni special forces launched an offensive Tuesday in rugged terrain, searching for an Al Qaeda bomb maker believed to have designed explosives concealed in printer cartridges that were intercepted in two U.S.-bound packages last week. The hunt for Ibrahim Asiri, a Saudi-born munitions expert, intensified in militant strongholds in Shabwa and Marib provinces. It is the third major operation against Al Qaeda in recent months but one that has taken on new urgency since a plot to blow up aircraft over the U.S. was uncovered Friday.

Anwar Awlaki, the U.S. citizen killed last year in a CIA drone strike in Yemen, was instrumental in the failed plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner in December 2009, according to a Justice Department court document filed Friday. A sentencing memorandum for Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who pleaded guilty in October to attempting to down the jetliner with a bomb sewn into his underwear, makes public for the first time some of the evidence that led President Obama to order a lethal strike against Awlaki, the Al Qaeda-linked cleric who was born in New Mexico.

May 22, 2013 | By Ken Dilanian and Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON - As President Obama prepared to deliver a major speech on national security Thursday, his administration acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four U.S. citizens - one more than previously known - in drone missile strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. The disclosure Wednesday raised fresh questions about the secret drone campaign, a signature part of Obama's counter-terrorism effort, in which several thousand suspected terrorists, militants and others have been killed.

In the divided world of American politics, it's not easy to find an issue on which the legal affairs correspondent for the Nation and the former chairman of the American Conservative Union agree. But we've found one: the crucial importance of transparency in government, especially when the president claims the power to kill us without charges or trial, by directing the launching of a remote-control drone. As this is Sunshine Week, a national initiative to promote dialogue about the importance of open government, what better time for the president to make good on his promise to lead the most transparent administration ever and tell us what's up with the drone policy?